Making Sense of the Theology of Work to the Unchurched

Making sense of the Theology of Work (TOW) to the unchurched addresses how Christians can witness their faith in their workplaces by embracing TOW. This study advocates that embracing TOW requires that Christians live and work as God’s stewards over His creation and through their work participate in God’s mission to restore His creation. It is a journey of transforming oneself and in that process, influence the transformation of their coworkers to embrace a stewardship mindset.

As God’s stewards, Christians collaboration is the way that they should. It is through collaboration that they get their work done and not by strife or conflict. Through collaboration, Christians demonstrate their beliefs and values through the decisions they make, their actions and behaviors as guided by TOW. Therefore, Christians need to be equipped with influencing skills to enable them to champion collaboration. This study adopts James Scouller’s three levels of leadership to equip Christians with influencing skills at the personal leadership, private leadership, and public leadership levels. (1)

These concepts of stewardship, collaboration and influencing together make up the framework to make sense of TOW to the unchurched and presented as teaching materials to guide Christians in their journey to embrace TOW and the practice of stewardship. Through literature research and interviews with three Christians, one a pastor and former publisher, another a private banker and another a training officer, the material’s content and approach was fine-tuned to ensure the individual not only experiences his or her transformation through this learning journey but also becomes an influencer to spread TOW in this way. Therefore, the framework was also compared against other relational evangelism approaches and a model on organizational health to test its broader application possibilities. The results show that though the approach was designed for office workers it could to be customized for other audiences as well but delivering the same message.

(1) James Scouller, The Three Levels of Leadership: How to Develop Your Leadership Presence, Knowhow, and Skill (Cirencester: Management Books 2000, 2011; Kindle Electronic Edition).